I’ve been focusing my studies on Gender Studies versus Violence, since I want to write about the relationship of women and militarism, which is institutionally described as masculine and patriarchal.
The more I read on Gender, more I realize how language is important and how discourses shape the way we are constructed and reproduce our world. All I’ve read until now, either by feminists or other theorists, seems to always fall on the same reductionist categorization of the social human being: first, gender; secondly, color of skin, most of times ’race’; third, sexuality; last, social class; even though this last two are fluid and change their position.
I’m using as introductory to Gender Studies: Richardson, Diane, Robinson, Victoria (eds) (2008)Introducing Gender and Women’s Studies, 3rd Ed, Palgrave MacMillan: New York, which is an attempt to demonstrate the development of gender studies without taking sides, but is for me a very feminist approach to gender. In all chapters, which are small articles written by different authors, I always find written: ’white, male, heterosexual, middle class’; to me a radical feminist and western approach of social categories.
After reading, not just this book but also other articles online and from books (through SOAS Library), I’ve been realizing that my own discourse falls in this reductionist categorization, and I’ve accepted, not without criticizing it, that my view of the social world is constructed in this way. Of course, I also reproduce it through my discourse; even thought I recognize its reductionism, I find hard to overpass it.
Foucault was right: discourse constructs the topic, defines and produces the objects of our knowledge, and since knowledge is connected to power, it assumes the authority of ’the truth’ and has the power to make itself true.
But discourse is fluid, and language, the base of discourse, is also a living thing, therefore discourses can change…
Run from the Anthropologists's Blog 